Childrens Mental Health Week

This year’s Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week took place from Monday 3rd of February to Sunday 9th of February.
This year’s theme ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself’ was set by ‘Place 2 Be’ who joined forces with ‘Here4You’ supported by the Walt Disney Company, through the characters of the movie Inside Out 2.
The aim of this year’s theme is to equip and empower children and young people across the UK to embrace self-awareness and explore what it means to them. We want children and young people to discover how getting to know who they are can help them build resilience, grow and develop.
Many of the students and staff embraced the weeks activities and participated enthusiastically in the ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself’ theme.

All students and staff were invited to an ‘emotions workshop’ to help make a ‘emotions display’. This was to encourage active participation in working together, socialising with each other and to promote reducing stigma around mental health.
Whilst younger students took part in a ‘know yourself grow yourself’ power point, followed by an amusing ‘game of emotions bingo’, the older students who are coming up to exams later this year, benefited from an ‘emotions and exam stress’ presentation given by Miss Crawley our school OT.

Each morning, over the week, teachers were asked to actively share a different ‘Emotion Chart’ to ‘check in’ with students during tutor time. Students could use this to point to, but more so to try to encourage discussion about their emotions and Mental Health Awareness.
S1 engaged well in a mindfulness taster session held by Miss Towse during Monday morning, getting involved in a breathing exercise and shared good feedback.

I feel I must take this opportunity to share the very creative and interesting work of one of our students, here at Parkside House school who has designed her own drawings of ‘emotions characters’ to express her feelings and emotions.

Whilst several activities were arranged, some students also wrote their own daily activity plans including local walks, laps around our garden area and taking part in the obstacle activity. There was a definite impact highlighting the benefits of being active and socialising together to increase Mental Health Awareness